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What We Carry: Poetry on childbearing

$24.95

What We Carry brings together the voices of more than 60 contemporary Australian poets to provide accounts of childbearing that are both lyrical and embodied. Featuring diverse voices and perspectives on experiences of infertility, conception, termination, loss, pregnancy, birth and the early postpartum period, this collection illuminates the endlessly different ways the potential to carry life is experienced. The poems invite you to share incredibly personal stories – some humourous, some sincere, some full of elation and love, others frustration or despair. They provide powerful insights into the potential for childbearing experiences to shape us, change the trajectories of our lives, and teach us about what it means to be human. For after all, all of us were carried, at the beginning.

Edited by Ella Kurz, Simone King and Claire Delahunty

Not Very Quiet

Not Very Quiet: The anthology

$24.95

ByMoya Pacey, Sandra Renew

Over the last five years, from the #Me Too Movement to same-sex marriage, from devastating bush fires to the global pandemic, the online poetry journal Not Very Quiet has dedicated itself to publishing women’s voices from across the globe. Not Very Quiet: The anthology selects poetry that has given voice to the social conscience of the community, constructions of lesbian and queer, the challenges posed to the social construction of gender, as well as the complexities and possibilities of the human condition.

Edited by Moya Pacey & Sandra Renew

9780648834311-Perfect

Airplane Baby Banana Blanket

$19.95

ByBenjamin Dodds

The latest collection from Benjamin Dodds interprets the bizarre true story of Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as the ‘daughter’ of Oklahoma psychotherapist Dr Maurice Temerlin during the 1960s and 70s. With deep empathy and an eye for subtle, telling moments, Dodds oﬀers a complex reimagination of Lucy’s fraught hybrid life through unﬂinching poems that fascinate and unsettle in equal measure.

9780648834380

The Incompleteness Book

$19.95

The Incompleteness Book is the result of a call for contributions to the theme: the incompleteness of human experience. The call was distributed in April 2020, amidst the global pandemic of COVID-19. The collection takes an interest in the relationship between the haunting incompleteness of human experience and short form writing. This, together with the unforeseen challenges of COVID-19, as well as the lure of coming together as writers, is the impetus for the book. The submissions are aimed at capturing our individual and collective experience as a composite picture. The contributions were collected in just nine days.

9780648834335

Man-handled

$19.95

ByMelinda Smith

Man-handled, Melinda Smith’s seventh poetry collection, includes the found-text chapbook Listen, bitch plus new work from the last three years. Its central concern is gendered violence, both verbal and physical. These poems also extend their gaze to violences perpetrated in the names of colonialism, nationalism and capitalism. While this is Smith’s angriest book, it still takes time to celebrate moments of connection and wonder.

Beginning in Sight by Theodore Ell

Beginning in Sight

$19.95

Beginning in Sight is Theodore Ell’s first poetry collection. It brings together work written over more than ten years, tapping into the memories, life-stories and mirror-images that resist time and recouple bygone experience to the drifting world of today. The poems branch out from Ell’s original home of Sydney into its hinterland, the coast and the Hunter, snatching moments of respite and pleasure in troubled times, before finding new bearings in the Canberra region. Haunted by the presence of vanished lives and histories, these are poems of perseverance, endurance and a past that seems to know what is coming.

Winner 2022 Anne Elder Award

Animals with Human Voices by Damen O’Brien

Animals with Human Voices

$19.95

ByDamen O'Brien

In Animals with Human Voices you will find worms that dream of god, jellyfish weary of immortality, a powerless Superman, some illogical observations on aliens’, a lightning conductor tired of lightning and the truth about Elvis. In multi award-winning poet Damen O’Brien’s debut collection, his cinematic eye and love of nature deliver poems which are ciphers for the normal concerns of every human: love, life and death and what we leave behind.

Nightmares run like mercury by Paul Collis

Nightmares Run Like Mercury

$19.95

From the author of the David Unaipon award winning novel Dancing Home.

Paul Collis’ first collection of poetry is a book of difficult truths and profound connections. It charts a life lived on the streets, on country, in the deep time of tradition, of relationships to land and family. This book mourns those who have passed, and the current state of places and people held close in the heart and in the kinds of knowledge inseparable from self that might be called ‘being’, but is always much more than that. It is also a poetry of hope in the hopeless, of beauty in small moments, and the overwhelming ‘now’ that is memory.

Errant Night by Jerzy Beaumont

Errant Night

$19.95

ByJerzy Beaumont

What would you do if you looked up and saw that the night sky was darker than usual? That the stars had disappeared, and nobody was doing anything about it?

What do you do when a loved one tells you that their world is darker than usual? That they see no light, and don’t know what to do about it?

Errant Night is an exploration of resilience executed imperfectly. In this sequence of prose poems, Beaumont draws upon the sci-fi wonders of interstellar travel and spaceship mechanics to throw comparative light upon the realities of living with the burden of loss.

Nigh by Penelope Layland

Nigh

$19.95

ByPenelope Layland

WINNER ACT Notable Book Awards for Poetry 2020

From the author of the award-winning Things I’ve thought to tell you since I saw you last comes a new collection of poems steeped in a sense of dark foreboding. Jumping from the global to the everyday, many of the poems in Nigh chime with the mood that all is not right with the world. Even in the seemingly mundane, or overtly beautiful, Layland finds some uncomfortable truths waiting to be unpicked. Nigh displays the confidence of a poet looking and thinking deeply about the world and offering it up in language as crisp as it is beguiling.

Borderless_frontcover_HR_210413

Borderless: A transnational anthology of feminist poetry

$24.95

Borderless presents a collection of brand new, specially commissioned poems from a wide range of contemporary poets refl ecting on feminism in its broadest sense. While it builds on the work of previous anthologies, in this one the voices of First Nations, refugee and migrant poets are a deliberate focus. These poems plunge the reader deep into the experience of life in the world, at this moment, in a woman’s body, and explore multitudinous versions of what that can mean.

Edited by Saba Vasefi, Melinda Smith and Yvette Holt

Cactus by Phillip Hall

Cactus

$19.95

Throughout his forties and fifties Phillip found himself on a sticky wicket: the grief for his baby son and younger brothers, suicide attempts, self-harming, the premature termination of his career, and the failure of religious belief to explain or console. In and out of psychiatric care, he has been treated for PTSD, severe depression and social anxiety. There are consolations: family, companion greyhounds, Sunshine, the Western Bulldogs and Australian Football, books, the fine and performing arts but, for Phillip, this remains a time of loss and despair. This is, therefore, a collection of lamentations, achingly focused on what it is to live with poor mental health, but it is also a defiant celebration of survival and the redeeming power of familial love, sport and the arts.

Strokes-of-Light

Strokes of Light

$19.95

ByLucy Alexander

Lucy Alexander’s new collection is suffused with subtle observations of nature, childhood, and memory. In imagery loaded with both immediacy and resonance, each ‘stroke’of these luminous poems invokes the sense that great and shifting worlds are coiled within even the smallest of things..

This Cathedral Grief by Adrian Caesar

This Cathedral Grief

$19.95

ByAdrian Caesar

This Cathedral Grief responds to the death of Adrian Caesar’s sister, Karen, from pancreatic cancer in 2012-13. This book explores various dimensions of faith—secular, artistic and spiritual—in an attempt to wrest meaning from the blank of loss. Without supporting any single position or belief, these poems are provisional statements, charting the impossibility of celebrating or memorialising someone successfully, much less recovering that person through language.

Texture cover

Text/ure

$40.00

Poetry, Music, Visual Art

If I could have given you a note

In your time of silence,

It would have the shape

of my heart

Follow one poem’s journey through word, song, and visual art. How does the form of the poem trans-form across different media? What aspects of texture, tone, colour, shape, and line remain? This full colour book marks the culmination of the Text/ure project, a tribute to the collaborations and creative processes involved. With original poem ‘If I Could Have Given You A Note‘, full composers’ statements, interview excerpts, visual art, drawing statements, and all six concluding poems, it is a feast for eye and ear alike.

Ragged Disclosures by Paul Hetherington

Ragged Disclosures

$19.95

ByPaul Hetherington

Ragged Disclosures is a prose poetry collection that investigates liminality, intersubjectivity and the prose poetic sequence. These sequences combine to create a complex and distributed depiction of an intimate relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic in this era of climate change and political instability. As the volume considers the protagonists’ diverse experiences, it explores the development of connected poetic tropes while highlighting tensions between prose poetry’s compression and the countervailing tendency for sequential works to present an unfolding narrative arc. The inherent raggedness of the narrative gestures, combined with prose poetry’s condensed and suggestive boxes, is playful, contemporary and quintessentially poetic.

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